The gaming world knows some famous key combinations. For example, the kids of the 80s to this day pray you up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A down. Other keys are so obscure that we've long forgotten what they're actually for.. Or Pos1. Or the index card next to the right Ctrl key. And a lot of younger people are reading this on the subway and thinking:Huh, I only know keyboards on my touchscreen?
But there is one key that unites the generations. A button that universally stands for respect, recognition or compassion - and is sometimes ironically, sometimes sincerely shared dozens of times a day in streaming chats. It's aboutF
.
The most famous gaming keyboard meme is celebrating its tenth birthday. And we'll tell you why behind the banal smile there is a rather complex context that we first have to explain to the kids of tomorrow.
Press F to pay respect
The F-Joke is a child of his time. Ten years ago we were all pretty fed up with vapid stupidity that only pretended to give us control. It was the last gasp of the quick-time event era, in which games let us press buttons to give us something to do while cutscenes played or we simply traipsed along a long level corridor.
Best
Example:. The Sledgehammer shooter was released on November 4, 2014 in a difficult environment, a year after the rather controversial one. On paper, the developers even tried to innovate - Advanced Warfare was the first part of the series with wall runs, thrust jumps and other sci-fi bells and whistles:
But in practice the campaign just followed the formula... sorry... Q: Some Hollywood star is cast as a villain, you power through a few hokey levels, everything is dripping with pathos.
The sad climax: Your best friend is buried in the game, you stand at the grave and the game tells you:Please press F to pay respect.
In this short, banal moment, so much came together that annoyed us about Triple-A game design at the time that it spread symptomatically across the internet like wildfire.
From gaming to streaming memes
Usually jokes rarely live long and even memes go out of fashion at some point, but F has endured. Reason for this: The gesture behind it migrated into Twitch chat jargon. At first, people started hitting the F key more for fun whenever they wanted to show some form of respect. Do you manage to score a blatant kill?F
. An MMO is taken offline?F
. A plant withers because Streamer XY doesn't water it?F
.
F in the chat
Conversely, it developed into instructions from streamers to their own community. The meme became a short code: Now I want to see respect, dear people. There are hundreds of Fs under the F anniversary Reddit thread:
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Until today it willF
often used as recognition with an ironic undertone - often, but not exclusively. People also type about real tragediesF
in the comments on YouTube or in the Twitch chats.F
also functions as real sympathy: we empathize.
F
is anything but one-dimensional. Behind this there may be a very specific criticism of the game design quirks of triple-A studios. But it's also used by thousands of people who haven't even heard of Advanced Warfare - sometimes as ironic fluffy gamer-speak, sometimes as sincere sympathy. If you don't believe us, then press X to doubt it.
